(See Cover)
Comrades, we live at a splendid time: Communism has become the invincible force of our century. The further successes of Communism depend to an enormous degree on our will, our unity, our foresight and resolve. Through their struggle and their labor, Communists, the working class, will attain the great goals of Communism on earth. Men of the future, Communists of the next generations, will envy us.
—Nikita Khrushchev, addressing party conference, Jan. 6, 1961
I think most of our people cannot understand that we are actually at war. They need to hear shells. They are not psychologically prepared for the concept that you can have a war when you don't have actual fighting.
—Admiral Hyman Rickover, addressing U.S. Senate Committee on Defense Preparedness, Jan. 6, 1958
The President of the U.S. leaned back in his overstuffed leather chair, propped his size-10½ black Oxfords on a footrest, reached out his hand and sent a world globe spinning in its cradle. Then he thumped it to a stop with his finger. leaned forward and squinted. In the week of Laos, John F. Kennedy was thoroughly aware of Khrushchev's battle cry—and he didn't have to hear shells to believe that there is a war on.
The war, as President Kennedy sees it, is not likely to take the form of a big nuclear blowoff, although he intends to be prepared for one. The 19605. he thinks, will be an era of messy internal struggles where opposing sides are fed help and guidance by the two major world powers. "The struggle." said he, "is changing. It's not a question of troops marching across a frontier. We face the problems of having 'Spains' all over in the next decade. Laos is an example—Viet Nam. the Congo. It is a question of subversion and paramilitary political techniques. The force of events in those areas will mean military and paramilitary struggles for the next decade."
In walking into the decade as commander in chief of the forces of freedom, John Kennedy is not preoccupied with bombers, carriers or divisions for their own sake. But he is fond of the statement made in 1954 by General Walter Bedell Smith, then Under Secretary of State: "It will be well to remember that diplomacy has rarely been able to gain at the conference table what cannot be gained or held on the battlefield." Says the President: "I'm interested in what our objectives are, not the military struggle." Despite the setbacks in his first major crisis, he has determined on one single-minded answer to the single-minded challenge he reads into Nikita Khrushchev: the U.S. must win the cold war.
Fusion. In the 14 years of this global war it never wanted, the U.S. has used a number of key words to explain its defense philosophy: containment, deterrence, massive retaliation, balance of terror, limited war, etc. But somehow it has given short shrift to the key word "win." The omission was strange, for if the last years proved anything, they proved that nothing less than winning would serve as a defense philosophy against the Soviets' clear declaration of undeclared war.